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Thursday, May 24, 2012

Raz and the Internettes

I don't work at the movie theater anymore. In fact, I quit more than a year ago, in April. I spent that summer seeing the world and watching YouTube videos, in that order. But I went broke rather quickly. That happens when you don't have a steady source of income and you spend three dollars a day on cappuccinos at your local hipster coffee shop. Bottom line, I got another job.

The process was shockingly simple, and involved calling up a high school friend who said he could get me part time work. Now, I know how that sounds, but this was all very legitimate. I am now working at ReverbNation, a website geared toward the independent music industry. I got the job without any experience or real qualifications ("HTML familiarity" and "attention to detail," according to my beautifully formatted resume), and half a semester of college education.

They hired me without even knowing what they were going to do with me, and for a few weeks I worked with various departments, but that makes the company sound much larger than it is. The difference between working in Operations versus working with the Product team, for example, was a hallway and a flight of stairs from one end of the building to the other. There are around 60 people who work there. Seven of them are named Steve. Not kidding. Seven.

I must have shown promise as a QA tester, because that's what I've been doing ever since. (QA stands for "Quality Assurance.") Basically, I break things. It's exhilarating. We all remember that burning desire we had as toddlers and young children to knock down lego towers, stop on sand castles, and rip the heads off of Barbie dolls. That's what I do, except with web pages.

As one of my coworkers put it, I'm the only one in the building that's disappointed when everything works properly. He was right. I take it personally when someone declares something unbreakable, and feel like a failure when I am unable to virtually (har har, get it?) bring something to its knees. Each new assignment is a daunting quest, and I am the last line of defense between these untamed beasts and the unsuspecting public. It is a great and terrible responsibility.

I started back in October, but when spring rolled around, they asked me what my plans were for the summer, and offered me an internship. I won't be the only summer intern; there are others starting in June, but since I've been there for about six months already, I elected myself captain and decided we should call ourselves "Raz and the Internettes." I didn't realize, until I said it aloud, that "Internettes" sounds like "Internets," and since we're a website, that's just too beautiful a pun to pass up. The reaction was maybe one notch above rotten tomatoes, but I was laughing too hard to care.